How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Today on the blog I am sharing with you my five basic steps you need in order to start making money with affiliate marketing. This post is helpful if you are new to the blogging world and have no idea what affiliate marketing is, or if you are familiar with the concept of affiliate marketing and you want to gain some extra knowledge on the subject.
WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is when a business rewards an affiliate (i.e. a blogger) with a commission for generating traffic and sales to that particular business.
For example, let’s say you are a fashion blogger and you love a particular clothing brand. You could become an affiliate for that brand, market and advertise for the brand, and earn commission on purchases customers make because of finding the brand through your blog or other forms of social media. Make sense?
A lot of bloggers earn some kind of commission through affiliate marketing. Some bloggers make upwards of $50,000 – $100,000 per month all from affiliate marketing! However, most bloggers don’t take full advantage of affiliate marketing — not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know how to.
Today I am sharing with you how to make money with affiliate marketing in 5 easy steps. Plus, stick around until the end for a bonus!
♡ Have you started your blog yet? Take the very first step to start earning with affiliate marketing and create your own blog! You can follow my easy step by step guide to starting your blog.
1. Join Affiliate Groups
First and foremost, in order to make money with affiliate marketing, you need to join affiliate groups and become an affiliate! Below you will find a very short list of affiliate groups you could potentially join.
I would research different affiliate groups and compare commission rates, brands involved in each group, cookie durations, if there are any requirements to be accepted into the group, etc. and apply to the ones that best fit you and your needs.
- AWIN
- ShareASale
- Amazon
- Bluehost
- VigLink
- Target
- RewardStyle
2. Create Quality Content
This is a no brainer. You need to create quality content that readers will want to click on. If no one is interested in your content then there is absolutely no way you can sell to your audience and make money with affiliate marketing.
Put yourself in your reader’s shoes. What kind of content are you searching for online? What kind of content can you create that will help your readers and bring them back to your blog for more?
The most important thing to think about with your writing is: what will my reader gain from this? If your reader has nothing to gain from your blog post, chances are they will leave the post before you get the chance to sell your product or service to them.
If you’re struggling to write quality content you can check out my article on how to write better blog posts!
3. Promote the Right Products or Services
Once you are accepted into an affiliate program, it’s time to promote!
Remember you want to promote services and products that fit your brand not to confuse and turn off your readers. The best way to make sales through your affiliate links is to have the trust of your readers.
You can begin promoting the products or services you are affiliated with on all social media platforms you belong to. Find what works best for you, like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. However, I would 100% recommend promoting your affiliate links on Pinterest.
You can do so by promoting a blog post you wrote that includes affiliate links. Or you can promote a pin that sends the reader directly to one affiliate link (not a blog post). This can be a pin for an ebook, a blogging course, or a product/service that you love.
Bloggers find success with both options, so mix it up. Try both and see which you have the most success with. But whatever you do, promote, promote, promote! You want your content out there for as many people to see (but not in a spammy way). Continue to share your most popular pins on Pinterest and your other social media platforms that get you the most traffic from.
4. Track and Measure Results
Most affiliate programs give you an option to track the performance of your links. You can see how many clicks you are getting on your affiliate links and how many sales are coming from certain affiliate links.
This is important to you because you can see which products/services your audience is most interested in and continue to promote those. In turn, you can see which links get you ZERO action, and you can change your promotional tactics for those links, or nix them altogether.
You don’t want to waste your time and energy on promoting affiliate links that get you nowhere. Having the means to track your affiliate data and actually taking the time to track it can only help you earn more. Make sure you are fully utilizing this feature!
5. Blog Posts That Convert
There are 4 types of blog posts that are proven to convert into sales.
- Promote physical products
- Promote online courses
- Promote digital products (eBooks)
- Promote professional services
Bloggers have success incorporating all four types of promotional blog posts — but again, if you decide to create one or all four types of promotional posts you want to make sure they are relevant to your site. You don’t want to promote an eBook about finances if your entire site is dedicated to fitness.
Unless of course, you can prove to your readers how it relates to you and your content.
If you truly believe in a product or service, it can authentically be conveyed to your readers — thus, gaining their trust and eventually leading to more sale conversions.
BONUS: Build a Six-Figure Blog
Remember when I was talking about bloggers who make upwards of $50,000 – $100,000 per month from blogging? One of them is Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, founder of the blog Making Sense Of Cents, and she makes over $50,000 in affiliate marketing every single month.
She is the master of making money with affiliate marketing. She knows affiliate marketing so well that she designed a course around it as a way to teach bloggers like you and me how to make the most of affiliate marketing. Her course is appropriately titled Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.
This course lays out a step-by-step affiliate marketing strategy that shows you exactly how to increase your affiliate income and make more money blogging. Yes, this is a paid course. But believe me, it literally pays for itself. If you are looking to make the most out of affiliate marketing and skyrocket your blog’s profits, I highly recommend this course.
I put this course off for a long time because I thought I could learn everything myself and for free. But if I had taken this course earlier in my blogging career I would have made so much more money, and a whole lot sooner.
You can check out Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing for step-by-step money making strategies with affiliate marketing!
